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Sunday, March 17, 2013

Birds of Prey

The passengers on the train to Mexico City had plenty of
reason to be nervous. Times are rough and there is a railway strike
in Mexico at the moment. Trains everywhere are being tied up and delayed, and
as if that weren’t enough, part of the journey takes the train through a region
that has a rather bad reputation. And then there are the vultures flying
overhead, like an omen of doom. With all that to deal with, the corpse was most
certainly not needed.

But a corpse does pop up in Todd Downing’s Vultures in the Sky, and it is the
corpse of a Mexican man. He has died under strange circumstances, which don’t
necessarily rule out a natural death but which certainly makes the theory far
less tenable than it might otherwise have been. If this is a case of murder,
the killer acted swiftly and murdered the man under circumstances where the
fellow passengers’ vision was impaired. But the killer didn’t count on one man
on board: U.S. Customs Service agent Hugh Rennert.

Todd Downing was a mystery author from the “Golden Age” of the
detective story, and as a result Vultures
in the Sky (1935) is influenced by many of the trends of the detective
novel from the time. This is a mystery in which you’re given all the clues and
the author still manages to fool you over the question of whodunit. The story
is excellent, and has all the hallmarks of an excellent mystery: red herrings,
false trails, a decent-sized cast of suspects, multiple murders, and most
important of all, a solution that produces The Homer Simpson Effect— i.e. that moment
when the reader slaps himself in the forehead and screams “D’oh!” for not solving
the mystery sooner.

At the same time, there’s an excellent human dimension to
the story. It has well-defined characters and some of the finest atmosphere I’ve
ever come across in a detective
story. Downing really gets a sense of menace and danger into the story. There’s
a particularly good sequence that comes late in the novel (so please pardon my vagueness).
Without revealing too much about the
circumstances, the train stops moving and the passengers are stranded in the
middle of the desert, with only a few matches between them and a potential
murderer running loose. The tension in this sequence is stretched out to an
almost unbearable degree, and you can easily picture yourself on board this hell-train,
cowering in fear of your life.

I don’t want to say too much about characters because of
spoilers, but I really like what Downing did. There’s some real complexity to
these characters, and Downing’s views on race are also quite interesting to see
in a novel from the 1930s. For instance, at one point Hugh Rennert reads a hackneyed,
cliché newspaper article that paints Mexico as a barbaric land where human
sacrifice is still practiced and whose inhabitants are little more than
savages. He dismisses the article as a dismal failure, and as it turns out, the
article’s author agrees with him, having written it while hung over!!!

I don’t really have anything to criticize about Vultures in the Sky. This is a terrific
novel and I highly recommend it. It’s one of those small masterpieces from the
Golden Age that I love running across, my very favourite kind of mystery. If my
review fails to do the book justice, well, I’ll blame TomCat for beating
me to the review just as I was getting ready to write it up. But I’ll have
my revenge next time when I review Downing’s The Last Trumpet.

Note: Full
disclosure: I was given this book in exchange for an honest review. The
publisher is Coachwhip Publications. Coachwhip has done a wonderful job yet
again with the typesetting, editing, proofreading, etc. and the book itself is
lovely, suffering from none of the flaws that some print-on-demand presses are
associated with. The binding is sturdy and I absolutely love the cover image.
This edition is highly recommended, and you can’t go wrong with Downing’s book.
It’s a must-read for Golden Age fans.

5 comments:

Sigh. I agree with everything you have said here, Patrick. I just finished reading it a few days ago...but my review won't be up for a few weeks yet. I'm paying the price for doing one podcast review a week - I'm written-and-recorded-up several weeks ahead. Grump. But your review (and TomCat's as well) are right on the money - it's an excellent book.

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